Bill Aulet and Fiona Murray

Bill Aulet is Managing Director at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has 25 years of experience in technology business operations and financing. He started his career at IBM and then ran two private companies, Cambridge Decision Dynamics and SensAble Technologies. Most recently he helped engineer a dramatic turnaround at Viisage Technology as its Chief Financial Officer. He has created hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder value by building focused, fundamentally sound businesses. He has raised $100 million in institutional financing via private placements and public offerings. Mr. Aulet now works with students and start-up companies to build strategies and operating plans that will create sustainable value. He has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a graduate degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was a Sloan Fellow. He can be reached at aulet@mit.edu.

Fiona Murray is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. For the past several years she has also served as Faculty Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and has over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship education and research. She started her career with a degree in chemistry from Oxford and moved to the US for a PhD from Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Since joining MIT’s Sloan School, Fiona has collaborated closely with the School of Engineering and the Deshpande Center working with students and faculty to take a disciplined approach to transforming their ideas into impact. Through the iTeams course she has worked with numerous founders and commercialization teams, as well as with MIT’s leading science and engineering faculty.

An expert on the history, policies and dynamics of innovation-driven entrepreneurial ecosystems, Fiona engages around the world with policy-makers and entrepreneurs to bring a more systematic approach to their entrepreneurial activities in universities, medical centers and beyond. As part of this engagement, she is a founder and serves as a co-director of the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP). Fiona’s research focuses on the design of effective innovation and entrepreneurship policies and programs including competitions, accelerators, intellectual property rules. Some of her most widely read scholarship focuses on the role of women in science, commercialization and entrepreneurship. Most recently she has been examining the powerful role of philanthropists and foundations in shaping universities and their surrounding entrepreneurial ecosystems. Her work has been published widely in journals as diverse as Science, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine as well as economics and management journals.